Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 102166 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 511(@200wpm)___ 409(@250wpm)___ 341(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 102166 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 511(@200wpm)___ 409(@250wpm)___ 341(@300wpm)
“Of course,” Finn said, his press-conference smile firmly in place.
“I’ll be right back with your drinks.”
“What does wine taste like?” Iris asked after the hostess walked off.
“You’ve never had wine?” Finn asked, brows rising.
“No. We don’t have grapes in the ocean.”
“Of course. We probably should have put some wine tasting in your training. You can pretend to sip it if you don’t care for it. It’s … an acquired taste. Henry forced me to learn to like it over the course of six months. I ordered a pretty sweet one, so it’s a decent introduction.”
“Why can’t you just drink what you like?” Why couldn’t she?
“It’s more about proper etiquette. You never know what you are going to be served at various events or someone’s dinner party. It would be rude to turn something down or not at least taste it.”
“I guess that makes sense. I feel that way about fish eggs.”
“You don’t like caviar?”
Iris couldn’t help the full-body shiver at just the idea of the eggs. She was surprised by the laugh that escaped Finn—the sound making a different kind of shiver move through her. And that smile he shot her? It almost looked real.
“Did you try to get out of it when you were younger?”
“There was a particularly disastrous time I tried to hide them in my bra, only to have them float out in front of important company.”
He was laughing now—really laughing—and the sound made something in her crack open.
Maybe he wasn’t just a mouthpiece in slacks. Maybe, under all the polish and platform language, there was still a person in there.
She could almost see it in the way his eyes lit up when he mentioned his parents, the way his voice softened when he asked about her sisters.
“My mother was furious,” she concluded.
“It sounds like she’s hard on you.”
“She has high standards. And my older sister effortlessly meets them. So it tends to be a bone of contention that I don’t or can’t.”
“You have a younger sister too, right?”
“Yes. Shelly isn’t like me or Juna. She’s kind of obsessed with the surface. She was very upset that she didn’t get to be the one to come here with you.”
“What is in her future? Juna is meant for the throne, I assume.”
“Yeah. Actually, I don’t know. I don’t know if my mother knows yet, honestly. She’s still pretty young. She’s definitely in her ‘defiance, then moping when she doesn’t get her way’ phase.”
“That makes sense.”
“Did you ever have one?”
“One what?”
“Defiance phase.”
“Oh, no.”
“Of course not,” Iris mumbled under her breath, disappointed that she couldn’t at least imagine that a much younger Finn had been a human being with thoughts, desires, and dreams.
“My father was killed just around the time when I would have been heading into that phase of my life,” Finn said. “Then, well, it felt wrong to misbehave in any way. My mother was already going through so much.”
“You were too,” Iris said, just barely resisting the urge to reach out and put her hand over his.
“It wasn’t the same.”
“How so?”
“She was trying to fight the city to get them to take accountability for their part in what happened.”
“A lack of security, right?”
“Yes. There should have been paranormal security guards at the very least. But she was fighting for wards in the courthouse, so it would be impossible for anything like that to happen again, no matter how sensitive the cases they were working on were.”
“Did she accomplish that?”
“She didn’t live to see it implemented, but she definitely got the ball rolling. It became a law about a year after she passed away.”
“How old were you when you lost her?”
“Two weeks shy of my eighteenth birthday. We’d spent the night before packing all my belongings to head off to college.”
“You were the one to find her?” Iris asked, this time reaching out and giving in to the urge to put her hand over his.
“Yes. It seemed … peaceful. I hadn’t even known she was sick. Her attorney said she’d known but hadn’t wanted to worry me.”
“But knowing would have given you time to prepare.”
“I don’t know if anything could have prepared me for losing both of them so young.”
“Should I not have brought it up?” she asked, noting the tension in his body.
“No, I’m glad you did. I get asked about my father quite a bit. But everyone forgets my mother. It’s nice to talk about her. She was a wonderful woman.”
“Was she in politics too?”
To that, he shot Iris a smirk that did not make her suddenly want to slip out of her panties. Nope. Not her.
“No. No, my mother was in public relations.”
“Oh, come on,” Iris said, helpless to fight the smile that spread across her face.
“Yep. Had her own firm. Can you guess where Henry’s mother and father worked?”
“So you guys go way back.”
“We went to college together. He brought me home to his family on the holidays so I wasn’t alone. He comes off as cold, but there’s a heart under there somewhere.”